Allocate time to a task

Sarah Perez

Hi there!

I am managing a project right now with several tasks that I want to organize in a sprint planning. Each task has a certain number of hours associated with it to be completed. I know there is a way to put the duration in time of a task but it doesn't really fit my use case.

I would like to:

- Allocate a number of hours to each task

- Allocate a start and end time to a task that has nothing to do with the hours needed to complete the task (ex: the task might take 8h but I have 1 week to do it)

- Allocate a person to the task

- See per week how many hours of work are assigned to a person given their tasks

How can I do this?

Thanks!

Sarah

Alejandra

Hi @Sarah Perez,

To accomplish this, I would suggest disabling the dependencies because when dependencies are enabled, the duration column is calculated by the start and end dates (while taking into account non-working days).

If needed, more information on this can be found in our help article: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/765737-project-sheet-columns-start-date-end-date-duration-complete-and-predecessors#Duration

I would also encourage you to submit a Product Enhancement Request to let our Product team know that you'd like to have this functionality in Smartsheet. 

 

Sarah Perez

Hi @Alejandra,

Thanks for the suggestion. Someone from customer support sent me some info on how I might allocate hours to a task and track total number of hours assigned to a person. I am copying their suggestion below in case someone else could find this useful. I'll report back if it worked for me or not, and if not I'll for sure submit a product enhancement request.

-----------------------------------------------

Thank you for contacting Smartsheet Support. I can see from your request that you are interested in using Smartsheet to assist with your sprint planning. I am happy to help with this.

By creating a project sheet in Smartsheet you will find that there are ready made columns for things such as ‘Assigned To’ where you would allocate a person to a task. There are also start and end date columns where you could define the start and end dates of the week that you want. The project sheet would also be able to be viewed in the Gantt chart which would allow you to view you information over time. This Help Center article will provide you with more information about working with project sheets, (https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/765737-project-sheet-columns-start-date-end-date-duration-complete-and-predecessors).

I would suggest that you could create a column on this sheet and use this to enter the number of hours for each task. If you created this column and called it ‘hours’ you could then use the following formula that will sum the value in the ‘hours’ column when Sarah Perez is in the ‘Assigned To’ column and when the week number from the ‘Start Date’ column is 1 i.e. first week of the year. I would suggest that you could create a field in the sheet summary where you could keep this data, the formula would be updated by simply changing the name to search for and changing the week number to look for.

=SUMIFS(hours:hours, [Start Date]:[Start Date], IFERROR(WEEKNUMBER(@cell), 0) = 1, [Assigned To]:[Assigned To], "Sarah Perez")

I have also included links to all of the Help Center articles that I have used to create the formula,

IFERROR Function

https://help.smartsheet.com/function/iferror

SUMIFS Function

https://help.smartsheet.com/function/sumifs

WEEKNUMBER Function

https://help.smartsheet.com/function/weeknumber

Create Efficient Formulas with @cell and @row

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2476491-create-efficient-formulas-with-at-cell